A sharp, refreshingly frank collection from a fresh voice.
A debut collection of personal essays on the meaning of being a woman living in a patriarchal society.
Pine (Modern Drama/Univ. Coll. Dublin; The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture, 2010, etc.) breaks years of learned silence to take feminist aim at taboo subjects. The opening essay, “Notes on Intemperance,” concerns her relationship with her father, a depressed alcoholic writer who “seemed happiest when he was as far away from his family as possible.” As she chronicles his struggle to pull back from the brink of liver failure, she examines the difficult emotions she experienced as a loving daughter who raged inwardly at her father’s profound selfishness. Her experiences starting a family of her own were no less painful, but for different reasons. In “From the Baby Years,” Pine discusses the pain of agonizing over whether or not she wanted a baby and then undergoing several unsuccessful fertility treatments. In another essay, she considers the female body, discussing menstruation in a powerfully unfettered way. Daring to offer details about such topics as menstruation during sex, Pine calls attention to the way female bleeding—and, by extension, the female body—is still seen as unclean. She suggests that her own discomfort with even saying she is menstruating is evidence of the pernicious way “women are policed. And of how we police ourselves.” In the most personally revealing essay, “Something About Me,” the author chronicles her “wild child” teenage years when she was part of the London club scene. A lonely child from a broken and dysfunctional home, Pine skipped school, drank, drugged, and had sex with strangers. Eventually, university life saved her, and she became a professor. But as she writes in her essay about being a woman in an institution built on patriarchal values, that home had its own breakdown-inducing stressors. Bold and timely, Pine’s book tells truths about being female and human that are as necessary to speak as they are to hear.
A sharp, refreshingly frank collection from a fresh voice.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984855-45-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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